


That Hour No One Knows

by zombified_queer



Category: Bugsnax (Video Game)
Genre: Ancient History, Blood and Gore, Cannibalism, Gen, POV Second Person, Pre-Canon, Violence, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29784777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zombified_queer/pseuds/zombified_queer
Summary: They came from somewhere in the desert. Their limbs were Snax, never-melting and never-rotting. They did not feel pain. They did not hunger, not often. They looked like you, a Grumpus like any other. Except their limbs were Snax.Or, how time is a spiral and the teeth of Snax are always closing in tighter and tighter.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 33





	That Hour No One Knows

They came from somewhere in the desert. Their limbs were Snax, never-melting and never-rotting. They did not feel pain. They did not hunger, not often. They looked like you, a Grumpus like any other. Except their limbs were Snax.

When they came seeking a new home, they were outcast. You were tasked with taking notes. The stories they told. Giant Snax in the desert, large enough to swallow a Grumpus without a second thought. And sometimes they did. You shuddered at the thought.

They told you about temples and worship and sacrifice with such passive bliss you wanted to be sick. But you pressed on, encouraging them to tell you every detail. 

The matriarchs went out to hunt. This time it was not to eat. It was to kill. They came back sullen and covered in blood and bits of Snax, fur matting. Like a chorus, they simply said It is done. It is done. It is done.

They bathed. You painted these impossible tales on the walls. At first small figues no bigger than your paw and with little snippets of the tales printed in clay. Sometimes you reread them and wondered how a Snak would swallow a Grumpus. Would it have teeth? Or was it toothless? An empty maw seeking to be filled.

There were no Snax that night. The matriarch handed down her orders. There was to never be Snax again.

The refugees from the desert spent their time idle. Blissful. Like cattle fattened for the slaughter, never seeing the knife until it was plunged in.

You took your notes. You painted your walls. There was nothing more you could do, not since you'd broken your leg on a hunt and the bones twisted and healed wrong within your skin. You took your crutch and you listened while these Grumpuses with Snak limbs braided each other's fur and told stories of impossible things.

Sometimes, at night, you could hear things howling in the distance. Grumpuses do not howl. You have never heard a Bugsnak howl.

The Grumpuses from the desert began to get sick all at once. Shaky and nervous. No longer idle and content to groom and starve. Now they were hungry.

They snapped up any Bugsnak they could reach. And the Bugsnax turned their limbs into new shapes. They often told you to try them, offered their catches to you, pleaded for you to join that little settlement of idle outcasts. You refused every time and pressed for stories.

The sick ones were jeered at, regarded as outcasts among outcasts. Often, they were ill, vomiting acrid bile into the sand and spitting for several moments afterward. No one spared a Snak for them. No one would bother.

It was greed like you’d never seen before. The fittest were doped back up, limbs contorted into new shapes. They were idle again, content to groom and sleep and do little else.

You found out how those desert Grumpuses did it. Traps of twine and sinew and what little wood you could find. You wove it in secret, like a story. And you would check the sauce-baited trap often. Those things you caught went to the sick. So they would not starve.

You still never put a Snak to your lips.

Then came the next order. The desert Grumpuses could not live. They were too strange, limbs twisted into things that only looked and smelled like food. They were to be purged like bad blood.

Like a disease.

Most of the desert Grumpuses were so idle, so complacent, so unconcerned. They sat still while the hunters took war clubs and broke open their skulls. You watched, if only to feel sorry for them. Sorry for yourself.

You have never thought about it before, but they were good meat. Fattened nicely. But it would be taboo.

There was nothing else. So it was decided. The desert Grumpus corpses were stacked in a room, out of the heat where it could keep cooler. The room was sealed with clay. You had helped to seal it up, paws covered in flaky mud. 

It would do.

There were smaller vessels too, meat harvested and sealed to bring home and cook. Those resided in everyone's home. A pact. A dark secret. Survival in a clay pot.

You made your fire. You cooked the meat slow, coaxing it to tenderness. It was succulent.

That night, you added the first spiral to your murals as a warning. A signal that this was madness and it would have only one ending. You reminded yourself, as the paint dried, that every spiral must come undone.

Those who refused meat tried everything else there was to possibly eat. The cactus fruit caused hallucination before the Grumpus would convulse. Then collapse. Cold and dead. They were not spared.

The grasses never produced enough seed to be a viable alternative. Only enough for seasoning.

Sauce was the same as Snax when it came down to it. And the sauce invited the Snax into people's homes. It became too dangerous.

When the meat ran out, the village travelled back to the cave. Cracking open the entrace, you found everything was spoiled. Snax crept away from the bodies and into the shadows. They had not eaten the bodies.

Which made them marginally better than you.

There was a long discussion. A schism. Some went to eating Snax. They became fat and idle and lazy. And it continued in a viscious circle, spiralling down to the last ten.

And that included you.

There was nothing else to be done. Lots were drawn. Ten starving villagers became nine full Grumpuses. Then eight.

When it got down to six, there was a discovery made. The bodies in the cave were not disappearing. They rotted, just like any other. The matriarch asked you at her fire what you thought Bugsnax ate.

You knew the answer, but it was to terrible to force past your lips. She nodded, ruffled your hair, and left to sleep off the hunger.

Every night you added a spiral to your murals. A warning of the cycle. Madness and death and hunger. A blight upon everything the sun had baked into a subtle ruddiness.

If you were stronger, you could leave. You know there are other Grumpuses out there. You see their fires rising from other places on the island. Some nights, you make it as far as the plains before the noises in the brush startle you back home.

You decided you would not die like cattle. When the time came for the night's lot, you took your crutch. Raising it over your head was the strongest you'd felt in a while.

Crack.

The matriarch collapsed in the sand, blood matting the soil. Her war club lay like a forlorn toy. You brought your crutch down again and again.

When the first Grumpus rushed you, you swung. Something snapped in their back, the bones just waiting to splinter through skin. You brought the shards of bone out.

There would be none of this. No more lots. No more licking snapped bones clean for just a day more. No more slow coaxing of meat to tenderness. None of it.

When you collapsed, there was only one Grumpus left. Staring upward at the sky, you decided it would not be for very long. For the first time, you can see birds spiralling in the sky above you, their shadows falling into your eyes.

* * *

"It really makes you wonder, doesn't it?" says a new Grumpus, one with limbs made of Snax. "Shame we'll never really know."

You cry out to tell the storyteller these Snax are poison. A blight. But they're separated from you in so, so many degrees.

And so the spiral reaches its innermost.

And it begins to unwind. Reversed. Back to madness and hunger again.


End file.
